Slavery, capitalism and articulated modes of production posted by Richard Seymour

This brings me back to another point made by Banaji, which is worth quoting at length:

Labels: articulation of modes of production, capitalism, exploitation, historical materialism, marxism, mode of production, slavery

American Insurgents: A brief history of American anti-imperialism posted by Richard Seymour

Coming soon:

Labels: abolitionism, anti-imperialism, colonialism, feminism, imperial ideology, imperialism, left, liberalism, racism, slavery, socialism, us politics

Liberalism: slavery, imperialism and exploitation posted by Richard Seymour

I'll be speaking at this event in May:

Labels: capitalism, events, imperialism, liberalism, racism, slavery, the liberal defence of murder

Alberto Toscano on fanaticism posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'totalitarianism', colonialism, communism, enlightenment, fanaticism, imperialism, islam, islamophobia, native fanaticism, political religion, slavery

Moral education posted by Richard Seymour

Q: "How would you go about the moral education of a Papuan?"

A: "Provisionally I would make a slave of him, and this would be the pedagogy in his case, except to see whether a start could be made on using something of our pedagogy with his grandsons and great grandsons".

The tradition of pro-colonial evolutionary socialism summed up.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', antonio labriola, colonialism, evolutionary socialism, slavery

American Revolution: a preemptive strike against liberty. posted by Richard Seymour

Insult the Founding Fathers as a bunch of genocidal, slave-holding white supremacist patriarchs, and you're liable to irritate somebody's stupid little fetish. You're disdaining 'progress' or 'Enlightenment' or 'modernity' or something of that kind. Or, if your foil is the sort of boorish salon contrarian that likes to babble on about secularism while shovelling enough coke up his nose to cover the Himalayas from peak to base, you might be told that you're being 'obvious' or 'boring'. Of course, producing that sort of reaction is often the best reason for making such statements. But there are other reasons too. The fable of America's origins in liberty and rebellion, and its peculiarly missionary quality, is still one that commands a great deal of irrational support from various quarters, and it is the basis for an unenlightened exceptionalism whose function is to turn the global projection of violence and tyranny into a story of the expansion of human freedom. At most, an acknowledgment of America's serpentine origins in the system of colonial slavery might result in a grudging admission that, after all, progress didn't go far enough on this occasion.

Alfred Blumrosen and the late Ruth Blumrosen, who were civil rights lawyers when not writing history, performed a stunning attack on the commonplace interpretation of the American Revolution as one overwhelmingly motivated by the pursuit of liberty. Their compelling book, Slave Nation, which has been endorsed by no less an authority than David Brion Davis, is by no means politically radical, but the conclusions it draws are radically at variance with the consensus. There is compelling evidence that the revolution, at least from the perspective of the elites who led it and benefited from it, was motivated primarily by the desire to preserve slavery in the face of powerful emancipationist currents in British society, particularly the working class, which were already exerting a profound effect. The background is familiar. The early Hanoverian political order, issuing from the first truly capitalist settlement, was also a comparatively libertarian one for the colonists. Guaranteeing a number of minimum rights to subjects of the constitutional monarch, it both excluded the masses from political power and produced a doctrine of patriotic liberty - the 'freeborn Englishman' - that was fully compatible with the lack of democracy, various kinds of coerced labour, and rigid class rule. It was a doctrine that would be appropriated in various ways: used to justify war against England's colonial opponents by Pitt the Elder (the early days of democratic intervention); taken up as a weapon of opposition by John Wilkes; and of course conscripted to the cause of the American revolt. Given the pace of economic development in the colonies, the control exerted on matters of trade by the ruling oligarchy in London was a burden and increasingly depicted as a violation of the rights of all the freeborn colonists. The development of radicalism in North America was coterminous with an increasingly radical domestic critique of Hanoverian Britain, and it was the ideology of individual liberty that sustained both.

Anti-slavery activism was increasingly evident in both the colonies and in England itself, again rooted in an asserion of the rights of the individual against tyrants of all kinds. In London, freed slaves were encouraging slaves brought back to the metropole with their master to rebel and escape, while radical activists such as Granville Sharp were waging legal battles to win freedom for slaves. In the American colonies, the anti-slavery movement was pioneered by the Quakers. Its demands made an impact on the direction of the Patriot movement and were reflected even in the gestures gestures and words of those who were up to their necks in the slave trade. So far, so familiar. What then follows is that the libertarian impulse, which radicalised in the course of the revolution, helped trigger the revolution in France and provided an opportunity for Haiti to throw off the shackles of slavery and produce the first serious omen that the institution was untenable in the long run. In doing so, it also contained the seed of the future liberation of slaves in the United States. Through a close reading of Locke, as President Bush has suggested, the American revolutionaries made individual dignity and freedom the abiding concern of what has become the world's most powerful state, turning the latter into a matchless arsenal of liberty.

But suppose that a significant motive behind the American revolution, a far more compelling immediate cause of revolt than taxation, was the defense of the institution of slavery - that, so far from being merely accomodated by revolutionaries, or conserved by them in spite of their rhetoric, it was actually a major cause of the revolt? The Blumrosens show that a potentially devastating legal precedent, a victory of anti-slavery advocacy in England, added flames to the tinderbox and ensured the cooperation of colonial elites to preserve the institution of slavery through the declaration of independence. In 1772, a slave named 'Somerset' by his master, an accomplished colonial entrepreneur named Charles Stewart, had been baptised and sought his freedom in England. He was recaptured, enchained, and placed on a ship to Jamaica where he would be sold. Those who had agreed to be his godparents petitioned the King's Court on his behalf and - because of the previously successful legal advocacy of Granville Sharp, were able to win a decision to let him go, since his detention by force was incompatible with the laws of England. It was not that one slave had been freed - it was that any slave in England might, because of this precedent, claim the right to leave his or her master. And the news got around.

The colonial context provided some reason for slaveholders to be alarmed. Colonial legislation could easily be overruled by the Privy Council, and already had been several times. The British imperial power had faced opposition to its taxation policies, and even stimulated serious revolutionary upheaval for short periods. It had perpetrated the infamous Boston massacre against opponents of its rule (one of those 'motley crews' of multiracial workers discussed by Linebaugh and Rediker). But even so, most of the insurgency had died down until the affront of 1772. If parliament asserted its supremacy in relation to the colonies, and the highest legal opinion in England held that slavery was such an odious state of affairs that it could not be permitted in England, might not a skilled campaign with mass support actually obtain the judgment that the colonies as territories subordinate to His Britannic Majesty were subject to the same law? The rise of slavery had enabled the colonial ruling class to contain social discontent in the south by phasing out white indentured labour, permitting white workers to own one or two slaves and thereby enabling them to school their children and reduce the burden of labour they had to contribute toward their own existence. It was seen as an essential component of the southern system, but the same senior spokesman for the British colonial administration who had represented the government in imposing the stamp tax was now also responsible for describing their system as 'odious'. Virginia slaveholders were terrified that their slaves would take the opportunity to rebel, run away, and take their chances with the mother country. The southern colonists started to look at ways to secede, but they could not be sure that the northern colonists would join them in a bid to protect slavery: slavery was less common in the north, though still legal there, and anti-slavery agitation was more common. It has been imagined that the petition by the Virginia colonists requesting that the King abolish the international slave trade was an appeal to end slavery - clearly, no such thing. The fact was that the domestic slave population could reproduce itself, at least in Virginia if not in other parts of the south where conditions were more harsh. And voices were beginning to be raised that the importation of so many blacks was diluting the culture and intellectual advancement that whites could bring to bear. But what it did was permit a vague anti-slavery flavour, which Jefferson could take up without actually calling for the abolition of slavery itself (there is, as Gerald Horne writes, some doubt about the sincerity of his earlier anti-slavery opinions, but no doubt that he later drifted toward the belief in a biological inequality of races).

So, it was the Virginia Resolution calling for intercontinental correspondence on the topic of Britain's abuses that first united the previously disunited colonies, leading to the first Continental Congress in 1774, which sought to assert the rights of the colonies with respect to their property. This was more than demanding the resolution of taxation issues, which could have been achieved without declaring independence from parliament. It was about ownership of all varieties, particularly of slaves. The southern rebels were able to cut a deal with John Adams, representing the other significant colony of Massachusetts, in the defense of slavery, and Adams would continue throughout the revolutionary era and beyond to resist all moves toward emancipation. Subsequent declarations repeatedly asserted and defended the rights of the 'peculiar institution', and it was no incidental matter that the British would try to fight its counterinsurgency war on the cheap by encouraging slave rebellions. If the colonists drew on Locke's 'natural rights' theory to justify their independence, they had to prevaricate where this seemed to conflict with their defense of slavery. Jefferson provided the relevant tweaking: instead of all men being 'born' equal, they were 'created' equal. A state of manhood and thus equal right could thus be 'created' by the decisions of white slaveholders looking at the case of slaves whom they might wish to manumit. The Articles of Confederation would specifically defend slavery's mandate across the states and implicitly rebuke the 'Somerset' decision.

And so on - without the original stimulus and the congress in 1774, without the deal over slavery ensured, northern and southern elites could not have united. There would have been no American nationhood since, until that point, the colonies were more integrated into the imperial centre than one another. Without the sustained efforts to preserve slavery by northern and southern revolutionaries, there would have been no revolution, or at least not then. That the 'pecular institution' would go on to exert such a dominating effect over the political life of the country, both in its domestic and foreign policies, is hardly surprising. It was the 'property right' par excellence, the reason for the revolt, and the basis for the future prosperity of the independent colonies.

Labels: american revolution, capitalism, hanover, progressivism, slavery, stageism

"The Saxons are coming, our freedom is nigh!" posted by Richard Seymour

Who would have thought that the above line would have been dreamed up by a New York poet? Written on the eve of the Mexican War, this was a concise exposition of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The line, put into the mouth of a joyous Mexican, foretold the liberation of Mexico (from Mexico itself, which had achieved independence some decades before) by the United States army, then still unproblematically considered an Anglo-Saxon army, the sort of community of white heroes that would populate the fascist dreamscape in the twentieth century. However, from other quarters, a more deadly intent was expressed. The southern slaveocracy fancied the prospects of expanding the sway of its 'peculiar institution' (you know the one). For others, the solution was obvious. Extermination. Extermination of the "mongrel race", who could by no means be integrated into America's white republic.



All were agreed that the US was engaged in an historic mission of "peopling the New World with a noble race" as Walt Whitman put it. (Don't let me deceive you. Whitman was a brilliant poet, who later shed his youthful imperialism, and who also had the good sense to do it with Oscar Wilde when he got the chance.) There was some dissent, and not only from racists who simply thought that going to war at this time would result in the racial dilution of America. Henry David Thoreau, for example, wrote 'On Civil Disobedience' in part as a polemic against the conquest of Mexico and also against the institution of slavery. Because, though the Saxons were storming under the banner of liberty, they were intent on slavery. The same people would spend much of the decade following Hidalgo-Guadalupe subsidising various filibusters to head into Latin America and set up slavery plantations - William Walker famously made himself the president of Nicaragua for a brief period, and during that time reintroduced the institution of slavery, which had been abolished. (Perhaps the 19th century filibusters have a twentieth century equivalent. After all, didn't Henry Ford try to set up a utopian community on the Amazon called - I shit you not - Fordlandia? Not slavery, but certainly a colonial effort and one that collapsed quite quickly). And they would try, during the Civil War, to form a southern slave alliance with Brazil.

Perhaps only a New York intellectual could have believed that a war conceived by James Polk and the southern Democratic slaveocracy to conquer Mexico was about to deliver freedom. Or, more precisely, only a New York intellectual steeped in romantic nationalism. But then, it isn't altogether uncommon for people to get the strange idea that they, who do not wage it, will determine what a war will be about. Intellectuals, for some reason, have a curious propensity to believe that they author such ventures, ordain ends, discriminate between means, and determine the outcomes. And they have an equal and contrary propensity to believe that, when things go wrong, their words are at any rate without consequence.

Labels: democratic party, genocide, james polk, mexican war, racism, slavery

Arguments for slavery. posted by Richard Seymour

In light of the recent refulgence of arguments for white supremacy, it is worth taking a look at precedents. No sooner were the British ruling class strategically terminating their own colossal role in the enslavement of millions of Africans than they bitterly regretted it. Such is the contemporary understanding of historians of that institution, at any rate. In a somewhat analogous fashion, as soon as Southern white slaveholders were defeated, they started to experience a "Negro problem" that made them regret their defeat all the more. This "problem" was experienced variously as economic competition, displacement in political institutions, the spread of education among those who had previously been strictly banned from learning the first letter of the alphabet, the resistance to continued subordination - in short, a transformation in the status of African Americans so great as to constitute a state of emergency for white elites. Their response was to revisit the 'peculiar institution' and to give rise to a flood of historical revisionism about slavery whose core doctrines would impress themselves upon leading political figures of the Progressive era, up to and including Woodrow Wilson.

The cardinal belief among the pro-slavery revisionists was that the institution was a sort of school through which all 'races' had to proceed in order to attain civilization. For example, Matthew Este's post-bellum text 'A Defence of Slavery, as it is practised in the United States' made a very particular argument about slavery: it could be a barbarous practise, he admitted, when the overseer was a brute, but Americans stood in the Anglo-Saxon and Christian tradition and could be entrusted with the administering of such a sacred duty. Biblical references were crucial here: Abraham held slaves, Moses too, all the old Semites in fact, even the priests. The practise was an ancient passage of rites, as venerable as wife-beating and child-rape. Since many of the foremost opponents of slavery were Christians who believed fervently in the literal truth of the monogenism and - to purloin a prase - 'moral equivalence' established in the tale of man's descent from Eden, it was obviously important to pay particular attention to scriptural support. "No institution," Este writes, "clearly sanctioned by Divine authority, contains within itself the principles of its own destruction. Slavery is clearly established in the Old Testament - it met the Divine Sanction - we cannot therefore suppose it is wrong". At any rate, slavery is not the product or foe of Christianity, according to Este - the province of religion is to abolish evils arising out of social relations, not to create or abolish social relations (which advert to a 'human nature', an essence put into manufacture by the Creator in the same way that the blueprint for a watch is put to practise by the watchmaker).

The slave benefited, of course. This was the ultimate moral mandate for slavery. In a moral/religious sense, in that he gains systems of virtue that were otherwise denied him; in a political sense, supposing he gains a level of freedom hitherto denied him (yes, it may be tyranny, but the other kind of tyranny was worse); in the economic sense (the most important of all), since the slave has learned the customs of industry, the arts of civilization, the means of self-government. Self-government is the crucial point: Americans were constantly faced with the question of who was fit for self-government. Since their ruling elites were perpetually having to give way to unpropertied classes (extension of the franchise), to enslaved peoples (ending slavery), to women (letting them out of the house), it was a decisive question. In this sense, democracy and independence are not political-economic states, but cultural ones. Can you handle your money, can you save, are you morally virtuous, is your wife obedient, do your children maintain cleanliness, are you industrious? Etc etc. Este cites the example of Rome where, he maintains, at its most virtuous and vigorous it was ready for self-government - but then it degenerated and so, Providentially, the necessary despotism arrived to save its olive-toned skin. Similarly, the procession through historical examples yields an absence of deities among Africans (a lack of religious wisdom); only a brief acquaintance with reason among Indians and Chinese (a lack of secular wisdom); and of course a total lack of written history among the indigenous - they have only oral histories. Egypt had its heiroglyphs, true, but never the remainder of Africa. (Derrida's attack on logocentrism becomes more comprehensible when you study the history of racist doctrine).

At any rate, the whole system at the late 19th and early 20th Century seemed ripe for re-examination. It was bursting with potentia. Democracy would soon mean the rise of the labouring classes. Abolitionism would soon overthrow peonage and wage-slavery. The woman would soon be out on the streets, cavorting with men of all hues. Children would no longer learn to obey, or expect a harsh competition over resources ordered along lines of race, class and gender to be natural. It was predictable that white capitalist elites would seek to invent a history that would legitimise their violent restorationism. John David Smith has shown that African American historians challenged this - often in contradictory ways, ways that accepted some part of racist doctrine, or worried over how much to accept, but the challenge was usually radical. It attacked the foundations of racism, the implicit or explicit acceptance of the white purview as natural, the Providential arguments - many of these writers had enough experience of slavery themselves to know how to unsentimetally dispose of such trash. However, it bears reflecting on the fact that their outlook would almost certainly have been seen as 'biased' by their experiences, as immature, insufficiently appreciative of what the cold, unsentimental facts of the matter would tell them. That seems to me to be the automatic point of view of those considering southern or Third World writers today, however liberal or 'moderate' they in fact are.

The current breed of apologists for Ian Smith are disgusting, of course, not least because of their resemblance to their forebears. They are, however, a breed almost as extinct as Smith himself (one hopes). Far more insidious, perhaps, are those who repeat the gestures of pro-slavery doctrine in bad faith, who accept its basic contours without the discredited racial mythologies. They still hold that systems of white supremacy can be an education in democracy, that populations can be fit for self-government only when an Anglo-Saxon Christian man named George takes them through it step-by-step (with a limitless willingness to use violence, and be enthralled by violence). They still hold that tyranny is a benign 'civilization' academy. They maintain, in such a way that it does not seem fit to question on CNN, that capitalist habits of practise are the surest road to freedom (Arbeit Macht Frei, in other words). They cleave to the cultural supremacy of the West. The only doctrine that isn't completely fashionable in liberal imperialist circles is the doctrine of biological racial superiority. The meme of 'totalitarianism', really a prophylactic against communism in their hands, has the unintended consequence of prohibiting their natural racism, forcing them to find inventive ways of commuting it through new discourses. The neocons of the Cold War found that racism was okay if it was seen as a meritocratic reflection of cultural hard-headedness, a proportionate reward for the will or lack of will to pull oneself up by the boot-straps - what could be more democratic and all-American than that? In a similar sense, today's racists find themselves on good standing when they speak of cultural distinction rather than a biological one. The culturalist aspect of racism, which was actually prevalent during the post-bellum pro-slavery revision, has not been successfully assailed, so that it remains the last refuge of the vicious supremacist. And so the arguments for imperialism that we hear today are arguments for slavery - how unsurprising that each imperial adventure seems to end in the long-term violent bondage of a whole country.

Labels: america, rhodesia, slavery, white supremacy

Whiggery and slavery posted by Richard Seymour

In a certain whiggish version of events, slavery is an evil that has been with human societies for millenia, and has finally been gradually eradicated due to Enlightenment, or liberalism, or capitalism, or some vague cultural amelioration, or to all of these as expressed in the British Empire. A strange view, to say the least: who doesn't know that the enslavement of Khoikhoi took place against the background of Dutch enlightenment and bourgeois reform, or that a certain kind of Latinocentric Enlightenment was enlisted to legitimise slavery (since the Romans, by enslaving a large portion of humanity, allegedly laid the basis for modern civilization)? It is not exactly occult knowledge that European capital benefited immensely from the slave trade - and actually, as David Brion Davis points out in 'Inhuman Bondage', lost a great deal from its long-term abolition. Liberal doctrines were deeply implicated in slavery, including Locke's theory of property, for example (see Andrew Vallis, ed, Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, pp 89-104). Precisely as many opponents of slavery disavowed the connection between exploitation and the cultural achievements of the ancient world, so they disavowed that connection during Europe's global expansion. As for the argument that slavery was always with us, it is certainly true that it has characterised class societies for a substantial period of their existence, and there are some continuities, but the differences are hard to miss. For example, as has been understood for a while, free labour played as decisive a role in Athenian society as its expansive slave labour system, even in agrarian production (the importance of slavery to the Greco-Roman world can best be understood in comparison with contemporaneous societies, where it was much less prevalent). By contrast, the colonies were often decisively founded on slavery. The Atlantic slave trade was unique in a number of other ways, in terms of scale (15 million Africans enslaved and perhaps as many killed, usually before the even reached the African coast), and of course in terms of its 'racial' dynamic, in which traditions of indenturing and enslaving 'white' labour (often Irish labour) were supplanted during the 17th and 18th centuries by the capture and sale of Africans. Some previous systems of slavery were partially for the purposes of military competition, preserving the independence of dynasties from the Iberian peninsula to Bengal, for example. The slaves of Islamic societies in the medieval period didn't contribute decisively to the surplus, but they did contribute decisively to conquest. In most such cases, the consequences of slavery were present in the domestic lives of the states that permitted or encouraged it, while for much of the period of the Atlantic slave trade, the consequences were effectively concealed by distance.

Of course, that only takes us so far. The fact is that the emancipationist movements in the early modern era were unprecedented. There were hugely significant anti-slavery currents in the Enlightenment expressed by the likes of Bentham (is any evil to be mandated simply by calling it a trade?, he wondered). The American South had to work much harder to legitimise slavery in light of the critique originating in the overthrow of the British empire, despite extensive official protection in terms of domestic and foreign policy. The British government was under waves of skilled diplomatic and political attack from millions of Britons before it first moved to abolish its involvement in the trade in 1807 and finally effectively abolished the practise of slavery in the empire by 1834. Only in part can this pressure can be explained by a moral revulsion against the extremity of British slavery, which was far less accepting of individual emancipation (manumission) than slave-owners in Latin America for example, and always had laws restricting a slaveholder's ability to free slaves. Why should it suddenly be a topic of revulsion at all, when it had been tolerated in various forms throughout various societies for thousands of years with only minimal dissent? Christian sects hammered against the slave system hard, but Christianity had been complicit in slavery until then. Clearly, the eighteenth century revolutionary tradition obviously deserves the lion's share of the credit - but in what way? It is clear enough that when Jefferson attacked slavery as "a cruel war against human nature itself", he expressed the revolution's "historic leap", as Robin Blackburn puts it, from the particularism of 'the right of an Englishman', for example. On the other hand, the revolution's founding documents referring to equality in fact meant a very diluted form of 'white' equality - democracy in American ideology was co-extensive with Anglo-Saxon white supremacy. Further, Jefferson's words were deleted from the Declaration of Independence since there was no intention of abolishing the slave system, and scholars have argued that they were really based on an acute augury about the vulnerability of slave societies to revolt (see David Brion Davis' 'The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution', 1999). It is sometimes observed that slave rebellions were comparatively infrequent and treated as patholigical eruptions rather than events with a social meaning - but then it had required sustained terror, starvation, mutilations, and the harshest punishments to achieve the required 'docility' (subsequently rendered in ideology as the 'natural' state of Africans). And after all, aren't all rebellions pathologised in this way (fanaticism, greed, lust for power etc) until the lie can no longer hold? The revolutionary upheavals contained a self-radicalising component because they were not simple top-down military revolts, because the (multiracial) masses insisted on being involved. But also because it intersected with and stimulated anti-colonial revolution, not only in St Domingue but also in Spanish America. Of course, one thing that made the property-owners of Spanish America so conservative and wary of raising democratic slogans was their propensity for spreading among free people of colour, (often inspired by Muslim beliefs). These constituted sizeable minorities in Brazil and Cuba, for example - compared with the tiny number of such people in the United States on its foundation.

One the one hand, it is true that the ideology of 'free labour' had to produce accompanying ideologies of racism (that is, cast whole populations out of the human race as such) in order to make slavery normatively consistent, and this partially explains the Christian animus against slavery - it required a narrative wholly inconsistent with biblical monogenism. Yet, as pointed out, free labour had coexisted with slavery in Athenian society, and with considerably more prestige at that. The unprecedented savagery of the emerging capitalist social relations coincided with a unique opportunity in the creation of a working class with a structural capacity not only for revolution but for abolishing class relations entirely. The ideal of what we now call socialism - high-technology, modern societies free of exploitation, hierarchy and militarism - was a marginal one in the aftermath of the French revolution, but it was for the first time becoming a possibility. This is as far from the Whiggish view of 'progress' as one could imagine: it is more like turning disaster into an opportunity, weaknesses into a potential strength. If the idea of reproducing communal forms of life prevalent in Europe during the high middle ages as the dominant form of production, without their parochial and gendered constraints, was a novelty made possible by capitalism, it is also one that capitalism has not ceased to militate against by all horrific means at its disposal, up to and including the peak of barbarism in the twentieth century. And there are no historical guarantees: capitalism possesses, as EM Wood puts it, an inherent "systemic opportunism". For example, capitalism doesn't absolutely need gender oppression in the same way that it does actually need forms of racism (because the imperialist dynamic is a permanent feature of capitalism), but it can and does make use of it despite apparent social costs (such as ). Slave labour continues to exist as a relatively small component of the global capitalist economy, and alongside it are far more substantial forms of 'sweated' or hyper-exploited labour. The states system created by colonialism in the Middle East frequently relied on effective slave labour. Kuwait was more or less a slaveocracy until the expulsion of its Palestinian residents. Who is to say it couldn't return as a mass system, given a unique opportunity or set of circumstances? It did return to German capitalism during its most barbarous phase, after all. The extent of slavery is a reasonable metric of progress, but it seems to highlight how complex and fragile even our current, unsatisfactory situation is.

Labels: capitalism, colonialism, slavery, whiggery

Labour relations in the New Iraq posted by Richard Seymour

So, they used "forced labour" to build the yankee Vatican in Baghdad. Captive workers trafficked from the Philippines were used to bolster Halliburton's profit margins. And they want to lock up leaders of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions for taking strike action. They've turned the army on them. The combined effect of war and sanctions has made junior proletarians of children aged between two and five years old.

For all the shock about the American state and its favoured capitalists - gasp - using slave labour (they've never done that before, have they?), this is not really unexpected. It was known in 2003 that US multinationals were trafficking slave labour to work for them in Iraq. Despite the 'free market' fundamentalism imposed on Iraq, they've never really wanted free labour and even the arse-licking union leaders such as those of the IFTU have had their offices stormed by American troops. And the occupiers aren't exactly known for their care and tending toward children, never mind anyone else.

Labels: iraq, slavery, US imperialism

Paul Gilroy and Weyman Bennett on the anti-slavery struggle. posted by Richard Seymour

There was an excellent debate hosted by the SWP between Weyman Bennett and Paul Gilroy on the struggle against slavery and what really ended it. Ady Cousins did us a favour by filming it. The opening contributions are here:





You can watch the whole playlist, including debate on the floor and summaries here.

Labels: 'war on terror', britishness, capitalism, racism, slavery